I'm starting the 5:2 diet, and yesterday was our first fast day. These are the dishes we did. As you can see, they may have been a tad over 600 in all for me, (different references give different figures) but the point is that they were delicious and so filling we weren't hungry lunchtime today.

Heat oil in the frying pan, add the onion and garlic and cook over medium heat for 6 to 7 minutes till softened and lightly golden.

Preheat oven to 220°C (200°C fan) Stir in the spices and cook, stirring for a further 1 minute. Add the tomatoes, season well with salt and pepper then simmer gently for 8 to 10 minutes.

Scatter over half of the coriander, then divide the tomato mixture into two oven proof dishes. Break and egg into each dish. Bake in the preheated oven for 8 t0 10 minutes and the egg whites are set but the yolks still slightly runny.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Remove the skin (and sinews) from the turkey leg and make a few slashes in the flesh. Finely slice one of the garlic cloves and insert into the slashes. Crush the remaining garlic clove.

Transfer the leg to a large flameproof casserole or roasting pan with the shallots/grelots the carrots, garlic, wine, thyme and bayleaf. Season well with salt and pepper, cover and roast in the preheated oven for about 1¾ hours or till the turkey is cooked through.

Remove the turkey and vegetables from the casserole and keep hot. Bring the pan juices to the boil on the hob, discarding the bayleaves. Add the parsley, port and mustard and boil for 5 minutes until lightly thickened. Correct seasoning.

Carve the turkey, divide into 4 portions and serve immediately accompanied by steamed new potatoes, remembering to count the calories.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

Suelle wrote:Best of luck, Ian! I found the 5:2 diet one of the easiest to stick with, so hope it works for you too.

Thanks so much Suelle. Certainly on present showing, it seems to me to be excellent. Just as long as I don't binge eat on non fast days. However from what I've read, that's not peoples' experience.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

ianinfrance wrote: Just as long as I don't binge eat on non fast days. However from what I've read, that's not peoples' experience.

Bearing in mind that the 5:2 diet wasn't constructed for weight loss, you do still need to be fairly careful on the non fast days. I found that I seemed to need a binge day every once in a while, but in the long run it didn't do much harm.

Second fast day today. This time it's Mexican eggs for lunch - finishing off the turkey for supper. I've not got the egg recipe in the computer at the moment, will post it if we think it's good.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

Another couple of dishes. First of all was a dish I found on line which is a slightly different variation - probably more authentic - that the Moroccan eggs recipe I posted before. This one is called Shakshuka. Here's the recipe. Beware, commercial harissa is spicy hot.

Roast red peppers in a hot oven until skin is blistered and charred. Deseed, peel and slice when cool. In a wok or wide frying pan, heat the olive oil over medium high heat. Add the onions and cook for 5 minutes, until soft and translucent.

Add the harissa and tomato pastes, ginger, cumin and paprika. Cook, stirring constantly, until fragrant then deglaze the pan a little with the honey and vinegar.

Stir in the roasted and sliced capsicum and fresh chopped herbs. Add both the canned and fresh tomatoes and the water. Cook gently for 10 to 15 minutes until thick and saucy. Add more water if necessary to achieve a good consistency. Season with sea salt and pepper to taste.

When Ready to Serve

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Divide the sauce among 6 oven-proof ramekins. Set the ramekins on a baking tray. Crack an egg into the centre of each ramekin. It helps to use the back of a wooden spoon to make an indentation in the sauce as you do this.

Bake until the eggs are cooked to your liking, basting the whites with some of the sauce midway during baking, about 10 to 15 minutes.

This evening we did a dish called "Herby baked chicken" This was less of a success, we felt. After the cooking time was up the chicken was overcooked, the vegetables weren't ready, the dish was lacking salt and our choice of herbs (mainly parsley with some mint, thyme and chives) not a great success. However it wasn't bad by any manner of means.

Cook the potatoes in a pan of boiling water for 12 to 15 minutes. Drain then cut into bite-sized pieces

Make a slit lengthways down the side of each chicken breast to form a pocket. Make sure you don't cut all the way through. Mix together the herbs, garlic and creme fraiche, season well with pepper and then put a little into each pocket.

Put the leeks, chicory and potatoes in an ovenproof dish. Pour over the stock then lay the chicken breasts on top. Spoon over the remaining creme fraiche mixture then bake in a preheated oven at 200°C for 25 to 35 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through and the vegetables are tender.

The preparation time was quite a bit longer than that shown as well. We'll probably try it again, but looking hard at the herbs we use and the preparation of the vegetables - and the seasoning.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

Chop the spring onions very finely. Weigh the pepper cored, then slice thinly. We didn't try this, but it might be an improvement to char/grill the skin and remove as usual. Sweat the onion, pepper and chilli in the olive oil in a small frying pan for about 10 minutes or less, until well softened. We cooked it covered. Now add the fairly finely chopped concassée tomatoes and the vinegar, together with salt & pepper. Stir well, bring to the boil and cook a few minutes more until excess liquid has evaporated and and the tomato well incorporated. Check and correct seasoning if need be. Form dips in the surface of the sauce, break an egg into each, and raise the heat slightly. When the white begins to turn white at the base of the eggs, turn to a simmer, cover and cook until the white is set but the yolk still runny. The first stage took about 5-7 minutes, the second about the same. Uncover. sprinkle over the parsley and serve.

275 calories per portion with 2 eggs each, about 210 with only 1 egg.

This was delicious and we'll definitely be repeating it. We've tried a few baked egg dishes and they are just about all wonderful.

Supper was thisRich Paprika Seafood bowl from the Beeb Good Food pages. We used 200 g of fresh hake, weighed prepared, though I was tempted by a monkfish tail, and 200g of mussels. Instead of using canned tomatoes with garlic, we used our own home made concassée tomatoes with a little garlic. It took much longer to cook the finely chopped celery and sliced onion in a little oil then the recipe said - nearer 20 minutes and more wouldn't have gone amiss. Again, once we'd added the next ingredients, the simmering sauce was still a bit unfinished after their suggested 10 minutes, and because concassée tomatoes are drier than fresh, we added a good 100 mls of water and in fact simmered nearer to 20 minutes here again. Seasoned with salt & pepper, though this wasn't in the recipe. We then laid the fish and cleaned mussels on top of the sauce and cooked covered 5 minutes as they said. The fish was perfectly cooked but the mussels slightly overdone. They should only have had about 2 minutes.

Anyway, the dish was delightful and quite filling. We could see this with some rice or potatoes as a "normal" meal, not just one as one for a fast day in the 5:2 diet.

Two real goodies.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

We made another dish from the Beeb Good food pages today. This was by Silvana Franco and was called "Steamed fish and pak-choi parcels" it racks up about 210 calories with 35 g of rice (weighed raw) between us. The Beeb says that without the rice it would have been 124 calories, which I reckon is a tad optimistic, though not significantly so.

Pretty easy to make and simply delicious, when cooked with some of the pollock we got down in Brest and froze. Using our fan oven, with the parcels in a roasting tin, the fish was perfectly cooked after 15 minutes as in the recipe. The only thing we did slightly differently was to blanch the stalky part of the pak-choy in boiling water folr just long enough for them to soften a bit as Fuschia Dunlop suggests for all her recipes.

This is definitely another keeper. Especially precious to us as we don't have that many good fish dishes in our repertoire.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

one thing I notice about the Kate Harrison original recipe is that she specifies 2 chicken thighs to a portion and doesn't give a weight or size, which is sloppy for an allegedly calorie0counted recipe. If you used the chicken thighs I currently have in the freezer the calories would be well in excess of 400 per portion, not the planned 230!

That's the one. Sorry - I did copy the URL to my whatsit, but forgot to paste it in here! Doh.

Since then I've gone on line and found another few low calorie recipes for fish dishes, that we should be able to do here with luck. We'll be trying them out over the next month or two.

As for your comment

StokeySue wrote:one thing I notice about the Kate Harrison original recipe is that she specifies 2 chicken thighs to a portion and doesn't give a weight or size, which is sloppy for an allegedly calorie-counted recipe.

I quite agree. While it's obvious that at the end of the day a recipe book has to stand or fall by the quality of the dishes you can make from it, there are plenty other factors that make one want, or not, to use it. The KH book we bought (because the Kindle index was hopeless) had just as bad a paper index! For example, we wanted to look at a recipe to which she refers in the text called Skinny Welsh Rarebit. Seems to me that such a recipe could be indexed under "S", possibly "W" or "R". As it was in the context of cheese, I then looked under "C". Nope. Finally, reading through the book because that was the only way I was going to find it, I did discover the recipe. It's called "Portobello Mushroom Rarebit" and has both "naughty" and "skinny" versions. So, out of general contrariness, I went and had a look in the index. You guessed it. It doesn't appear under "P" either. In this day of decent word processors which can index and cross reference automatically in almost any way you like, such carelessness is almost inexcusable.

Furthermore, she had the excellent idea of creating a calorie related index/listing, so sub 100, sub 200 sub 300 and so on each in alphabetical order. The "Portobello Mushroom Rarebit" doesn't show up there either. One wonders what other recipes have escaped.

Weights of ingredients. Again I fully agree with you. While it doesn't really make a deal of difference with things like courgettes or pak-choy whole calorie count is very low, it matters a great deal with ingredients with a relatively high calorie count. Actually it matters a great deal whether a leg of chicken is left skin on or skinned. though she does at least say they should. So - working backwards from the recipe, you get 110 cals per leg. Now in my Cofids listing I can't find a reference to skinless chicken bone-in leg. Cofids does give the calorie count of dark meat (boneless and skinless) at 109Kcal per 100g, so I reckon that's what she's working on. As it happens... I took some poultry to bits on Saturday and three birds (circa 2kg each) I dealt with gave me 1200 g as near as dammit for the dark meat (skinless & boneless) or 200g per leg. As you say..... it makes a deal of difference - like 100 Kcal per head. So were I to be making the dish which I'm tempted to do, following your recommendation (and my liking for tagines) I'd just use one skinned leg, bone in or not as was convenient, for each of us, assuming that the bones themselves don't really add much to the calorie count.

I have to admit that I am sorely - really sorely - tempted to scan all the recipes, leaving the extraneous guff to one side, put them on my website with decent indexing, and tell her I've done it and why.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

Hi,We made one of the fish dishes I said I'd found on the web recently. This was for a Smoked Haddock and Spinach Gratin that I found on a blog called Lavendar & Lovage written by a lady who divides her time between the UK and SW France.

The recipe was simple (just 5 minutes preparation, or a tad more if you use fresh spinach, as I did) to make and very good indeed. You make a layer of cooked spinach, put the skinned fish on top, smear over some low-fat sour cream and sprinkle over some grated parmesan and top with sliced tomato. Then you bake the whole thing half an hour in the oven.

Delicious. We're certainly going to do it again. The fish salts the spinach well, and the cream and tomatoes make a delicious contrast. When we next make it, we will probably use pepper and nutmeg to season the spinach, of which we'll use more (at 25 cals per 100g, it's not exactly a great threat to the diet). I felt it was better to chop it than leave it whole leaf, too. As a counsel of perfection, I'd be tempted to dry it off a little, rather then merely squeeze it dry, but that's no great deal.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

If using frozen spinach for a dish like that I find it dries out quite well if defrosted in a strainer, and in fact I've some frozen chopped to use up (bought by mistake, I usually buy whole leaf)

I made a sort of Thai green curry, the calorie count is generous as I have rounded up in places, I did the coconut essence + dairy milk instead of coconut milk trick, I think the milk only helps in so far as it is white, the little bit of potato starch I used as a thickener is more critical to get the desired effect,

StokeySue wrote:If using frozen spinach for a dish like that I find it dries out quite well if defrosted in a strainer,

Good tip! Thanks.

I don't think I've ever seen coconut essence here. Like the look of that curry, though. As for starch, when we were last in the UKI, we bought a pack of tapioca starch and that's what we tend to use. Obviously we've got cornflour and can easily get fécule (spuds) but with size of our tapioca starch purchase it makes sense to use that. I'm not convinced there's much influence on the flavour, and iirc these starches are all just about pure starch so won't differ much in calorie count or thickening capacity.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

ianinfrance wrote:I don't think I've ever seen coconut essence here. Like the look of that curry, though. As for starch, when we were last in the UKI, we bought a pack of tapioca starch and that's what we tend to use. Obviously we've got cornflour and can easily get fécule (spuds) but with size of our tapioca starch purchase it makes sense to use that. I'm not convinced there's much influence on the flavour, and iirc these starches are all just about pure starch so won't differ much in calorie count or thickening capacity.

I find there is not much difference between potato /arrow root starch etc except cost (arrow root is now a silly price); they are all very fine white powders with small starch grains that burst easily when put into hot liquid and form an almost instant starch gel Never tried tapioca starch but I suspect it is in the mix

I don't quite know what made me get the tapioca flour, other than the fact that it was sold in many different sizes by Wing Yip, and that I'm sure I read about it in one of my Chinese cookbooks. Like you, I was led away from cornflour by Fuschia. I can't say I've consciously compared cornflour with the others. Potato starch, as I said, is easy to get here, and I think I've probably got a packet, but it's very expensive.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

We made another new (to us) recipe today. This was from Kate Harrison's book:- for a Chicken, Lemon & Olive Tagine with couscous. KH uses 200g of chicken meat (leg) per person which is far more than we usually allow, but only counts 35g couscous for two.

We gave it to some friends for supper tonight, but with about 50g couscous a head as we weren't trying to diet. As we made it, we thought it was utterly delicious and we'll certainly be making it again soon. At 367 Kcals per head, even with a full 60g couscous per person, it would be easy to make it part of a sub 500 cal/day diet.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

We're having courgette fritters for lunch and the rich paprika seafood bowl for supper.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.

It was as delicious as ever. We're lucky in that some friends brought us down some top class pollock from Brest which we vac packed and froze. So all we have to do is hoik a pack out of the freezer. We don't usually add mussels to this, but whatever shellfish we happen to lay our hands on. Today it was a few tropical shrimps.

--All the bestIanhttp://www.souvigne.comThe Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.